Meet physician and humanist Brendan Reilly

Author of 'One Doctor: Close Calls, Cold Cases and the Mysteries of Medicine’ at UMMS May 14

By Sandra Gray

UMass Medical School Communications

May 07, 2014

His hospital was the basis for the hit television drama ER; he was profiled in New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell’s best-selling book Blink; and he is the author of One Doctor: Close Calls, Cold Cases and the Mysteries of Medicine, a memoir of the most challenging cases he has encountered during four decades as a generalist physician.

On Wednesday, May 14, Brendan Reilly, MD, will be the featured guest at UMass Medical School’s annual Meet the Author event, hosted by the Worcester District Medical Society and the Humanities in Medicine Committee of the Lamar Soutter Library.

After graduating from Cornell University Medical College in 1973, Dr. Reilly, a Manhattan native, served at Dartmouth College, the University of Rochester and Rush University Medical College in Chicago (where he was chair of medicine and Physician-in-Chief at Cook County Hospital, which was the inspiration and setting for ER during his tenure there). Most recently the Gladys and Roland Harriman Professor of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College and executive vice chair of medicine at New York Presbyterian Hospital in New York City, Reilly is returning to Dartmouth, where much of One Doctor is set.

In the book he recounts challenging cases encountered during his career, including the unexplained death of a close friend early on and confronting end-of-life issues with his own failing elderly parents, and reflects broadly on changes in medicine for the worse as well as the better over his years of practice. Reilly’s ultimate message is one of hope about medicine’s potential to improve people’s lives and the difference individual doctors can make.

Free and open to the public, the talk and book signing event will be held on Wednesday, May 14. A reception in the Medical School lobby at 5:30 p.m. will be followed by Reilly’s talk from 6 to 7 p.m. in the Faculty Conference Room, with another opportunity for book signing until 7:30 p.m. Books will be available for purchase. Learn more at the library’s events web page.